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Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

I’ve never met a person inspired by what we thought the Internet would be in the 90s who isn’t sad that it went the way it did. I suspect the more idealistic of the cryptocurrency people will also feel nostalgic when Goldman and JP Morgan run blockchain in a few years.

It’s extremely tempting, especially to technical people, to believe that some piece of technology will create net freedom and equality.

The reality is more mundane: technology is just a fancy word for tool, and the only thing the guillotine ever freed anyone from was tomorrow.

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Utopian thinking almost never comes to fruition because by definition it discounts a lot of negatives. It rarely comes from a place of first-principles reasoning about human behavior. And above all, human beings cannot see into the future so any vision is always incomplete and flawed.

Nevertheless, as much as there are heaps of shit on the internet - digital surveillance, bottomless wells of inane addiction, hateful discourse, etc. - I’d say there is a net benefit overall, and where the 90s techno-optimists were merely wrong was in degree and concrete detail.

The only real benefit I see is 1) Wikipedia, Sci-Hub, Archive/LibGen, and 2) the increase in general literacy that came from people commenting/posting.

I think 2) gets underestimated a lot - 10 years ago you could recognize a lot of stupid comments by the fact that they capitalized every word or the grammar and spelling were horrific. Those people didn't stop posting, they learned how to express themselves well through practice.

No, they outsourced orthography to smartphones.

There are SO many more valuable things on the internet than academic sites with genuinely useful material, even if you're not considering commercial transactions "useful". Forums, blogs, public libraries, newspapers, even if you don't consider the titans which we use so much we take them for granted (Google (Scholar, Books, Maps), Youtube, Amazon, Ebay, etc. etc.)

Just because there are parts of the internet like social media of questionable net positive impact, the sum total utility of the web for humanity has been an overwhelming positive. It's hard to see good things when you're thinking about bad ones. Take a step back.

The Internet (and especially the WWW) suffered the fate of television: advertising and banality consumed the user's time.

The difference is that Internet/WWW also involved some degree of technical and creative understanding, whereas twaddlevision is passive absorption.

All told, I would say the the Internet/WWW is progress. But like any human progress, there is a deplorable waste of opportunity.

Wayne Dyer used to sometimes take diametrically opposed criticism of his books, photocopy it and send it to the other party — together with the four simple words: "You may be right."

Here's the other envelope:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528350

The modern day equivalent to the old internet isn't YouTube or Facebook. That's the equivalent to Cable TV.

It's rather the private Discords, Signal groups and maker spaces, grassroots efforts like EleutherAI and what other cool stuff young (and old) people are doing these days.

Depending on how close you look, 2021 internet is everything as cool as it used to be in 1990. And yes, I was there.

How does one find such places?

Same way you did in the 90s. You bump around until you find something you like. Or get referred to it by a friend.

The vast majority of it is crap. Always was. There's also a ton of things you'll like, but finding the things that you like but not popular with everybody else is a matter of sifting through (a) the things that everybody likes and (b) the things some people like but not you. Those two things make up 99.999% of the world.

> I’ve never met a person inspired by what we thought the Internet would be in the 90s who isn’t sad that it went the way it did.

waves hand

I got online in 1991. Spent faaarrrrr time much time on Usenet. Almost got in trouble at my university for figuring out how to post to alt.hackers. I ran a computer lab, cannibalized some old IIcis, installed FreeBSD, got httpd running to spin up one of the first servers on campus. I debated with friends if WWW was that different from gopher. (I wrongly maintained it wasn't.)

I'm absolutely blown away by what the Internet has become today. It's far more amazing than I think anything any of us imagined. Yes, it's far from perfect, but to me the pros far, far, far outweigh the cons.

To wit, a NYT reporter wrote an article about how it was "impossible" to live without the Internet. The tone was clearly to condemn the Internet, but I found it applauded it. She essentially lamented how difficult life was without it. One example was the challenges of finding a place without Google Maps. It wasn't impossible -- it was basically what all of us had to do in the 90s -- but her standard had risen so much, what we considered "normal" she now considered impossible.

The whole Web 2.0 shift really changed power away from individuals to corporations on the Internet. The "appifization" further created walled gardens.

I remember using IRC, Lynx browser, Unix Talk in the 1990s and being genuinely impressed. I feel the same excitement with Crypto after many years.

Decentralized trust, pseudonymous identity and device-to-device communication will change the Internet for the better in the coming decade.

There is reason for optimism.

I like your writing, but disagree with your point. Tools (technology) empower people; of course, it's up to them to what ends they use them. You don't want to empower a fool. If we're fools, we might as well make guillotines. But if we're smart, tools is what will give us leverage needed for a better tomorrow.

> technology is just a fancy word for tool

The form and function of the tool have a significant impact on its use.

If installing & maintaining a home server (just a domain name and static content like vacation pictures) were as simple as setting up a fridge, more people would probably run home servers.

>> "The reality is more mundane: technology is just a fancy word for tool, and the only thing the guillotine ever freed anyone from was tomorrow."

Did you just come up with that? :O

It's true. If an existential threat is elected/takes office the guillotine can free us all from the tyranny of tomorrow.

>Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Freedom fighter vs terrorist is merely a question of narrative.

I wasn't being cynical. I am just impressed by the talent at wording it.

"It’s extremely tempting, especially to technical people, to believe that some piece of technology will create net freedom and equality." I think this certainly used to be the case; when geeks ran the valley roost so to speak, there was capitalistic ambitions coupled/borne from a sincere interest in tech. Now the former drives the latter, with characteristic milquetoast results (this isn't to say that the tech interest now isn't sincere, just that it's "source" and how it's shaped is different).

It's a subtle but critical shift in the drivers of the industry at an individual level, and it bubbles up through the firms those individuals build and try to sustain.

Many tools have increased net freedom and equality.

It felt (at the time and in retrospect) that the horribly capped upload speeds of broadband really destroyed that decentralized and equalitarian ideal. The fight against Napster, content mega-corps snatching up broadband providers…

There was a brief moment in time where P2P looked like the future, but a lot of powerful wheels turn against it.

To your point, business and the desire for control ultimately trumped what was technically possible.

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